Inside the Mind of BTK

296 INSIDE THE MIND OF BTK
The top screen displayed my image, the same one Rader would be
seeing. On the lower monitor, I glimpsed a nondescript room painted
the color of week-old custard. An empty chair sat in the middle of the
floor. Dull white light shone in through a steel-barred window on a
distant wall. I was dying to ask the guard where on the grounds of this
massive prison facility the room on my monitor was located, but I
decided against it. Everyone in here seemed so paranoid about security
that I knew my question would only make them more nervous.
The room was empty. So I sat there for several minutes, marveling
at how hot and sticky the air felt. Patches of sweat, I could feel, had
begun to seep through my shirt.
Minutes passed . . . Where the hell was Rader? I wondered. A guard
walked over and apologized for the delay, explaining that something
had gone screwy with the audio feed between the two rooms.
Waiting for the guest of dishonor to appear, I thought back to
something Casarona had mentioned the night before. Rader’s mood
had grown dark lately. A few days earlier, one of his violent fellow
inmates thought it would be funny to forge Rader’s signature on a “Do
Not Resuscitate” form. Prison humor, I suppose. Not long afterward,
one of the guards showed up at Rader’s cell to make sure he had actually
signed the form. Rader apparently stood there in the middle of
the cell, staring at the piece of paper and reading the legal jargon over
and over again, then informed the guard that the signature was bogus.
“Kind of thought as much,” the man told him, then turned to leave.
“Wait,” Rader said. He walked over to the tiny desk bolted into the
wall, grabbed a pen, crossed out the imposter’s scrawl, then wrote his
name across the form.
“Here,” he said. “Now I signed it.”
I attempted to hold in my head that image of Rader standing
there, reading that document. He was beginning to settle in. The
novelty of his new life behind bars was starting to wear off, and that
do-not-resuscitate form reminded him that the only way he would
ever leave El Dorado—outside of being transferred to another
prison—was zipped up in a rubber body bag, atop a gurney.
Fifteen minutes later, the screen of the lower monitor showed a
door opening. Rader shuffled into the room, led by a guard. His wrists
were handcuffed, and his legs were shackled in chains.
It hit me that Rader was far thinner and more gaunt than I could
ever recall seeing him in photographs or on TV. He must have lost a